Summer in the UK has taken on a distinctly ancient Greek character: the ground is scorched, and it has not rained in months. Meanwhile, the promotional colossus for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which has banked over a billion dollars, swallows other cultural events like a mythological whirlpool. But in the theatres, a different kind of Greek revival is unfolding. Greek tragedy is everywhere, and the hottest ticket of the season belongs to Cate Blanchett in Benedict Andrews’s Electra/Persona.
The Greek spirit extends to the dance world as well. San Francisco Ballet’s Mere Mortals, an astonishing piece inspired by the myth of Pandora, is in Edinburgh this month before travelling to Sadler’s Wells in September.
Last week, I caught Simon Stone’s reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia at the Bridge Theatre in south London, and the venue was packed, even for a Thursday matinee. The production, a story of kin turning on kin until intergenerational violence leaves the whole house in ruins and madness, drew a large and engaged audience. Part of the draw is the cast: David Morrissey and Mary-Louise Parker appear as Christopher and Montie, a modern Agamemnon and Clytemnestra whose marital spats escalate to the breaking point. Their children spend the play attempting the impossible: to honour their murdered father while showing respect to their murderous mother.
Stone has built a loyal following for Greek tragedy. His 2023 Phaedra, with Janet McTeer at the National Theatre, combined Euripides, Seneca and Racine. His 2019 Medea, starring Marieke Heebink at the Barbican, remains one of the best productions I have ever seen. That version opened with Medea leaving the asylum where she had spent the past year after attempting to kill her former husband for his infidelity to her and the children. Dread built like mounting corpses as the tragedy pushed toward its devastating ending. Both plays pose the same troubling question: what should women do with their rage when speaking it goes unheard?
The year’s most anticipated Greek drama, however, is surely Electra/Persona, a new work by Benedict Andrews featuring Cate Blanchett. Electra is a compelling choice because her myth exists in multiple versions: Sophocles and Euripides each wrote their own, and Aeschylus’s Choephoroi covers the same narrative. Euripides even mocks Aeschylus’s recognition scene, in which Electra identifies her long absent brother from a snippet of hair and a footprint that look (unconvincingly) like her own.
The fundamental story is this: Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus. Clytemnestra feels entirely justified because Agamemnon had killed her elder daughter ten years earlier. She spent the whole Trojan war waiting for her chance to strike. But her surviving children, Electra and Orestes, cannot forgive her for their father’s death, regardless of the circumstances. Orestes has grown up in exile, biding his time.
In Sophocles’s telling, Electra has nowhere to go. She cannot leave her father’s house because she is a young woman, and ancient Greek customs require her to remain there until marriage. Marriage is impossible because Aegisthus and Clytemnestra know she despises them, and any husband or child she might have could be turned against them. She is, in effect, a prisoner in the home of her father’s killers, without any hope of release.
This is the role that Elisabet, portrayed by Liv Ullmann, is rehearsing in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona before she breaks down and becomes mute. Alma, played by Bibi Andersson, is the naive nurse who cares for her, sharing intimate details of her own life to fill the silence, until she realises that Elisabet is watching her. The film has long puzzled critics who cannot quite decode the strange and strained relationship between the two women.
Electra remains a perplexing figure, torn by contradictory emotions: adoration for her father, indifference to her late sister, hatred for her mother, and an unceasing thrum of fury. One reason these tragedies keep finding new audiences is that they give a voice, and terrible agency, to female anger that has otherwise been disregarded. Medea does not simply accept abandonment; she annihilates everything her husband holds dear in a single day. Clytemnestra does not forgive her daughter’s murder; she avenges it. And Electra does not accept her father’s killing, yet lacks the strength to move against her mother alone, just as Hamlet does. These women are extremists, as are many figures in Greek tragedy, but their anger is more intense precisely because they have been ignored and silenced.
If the packed theatres are any indication, that silence is a thing of the past. The days of these women being overlooked are over. Natalie Haynes is the presenter of Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics on Radio 4 and the author of Stone Blind and Pandora’s Jar.